This guest blog post is part of a series from Educational Leadership authors. The following post comes from Rick DuFour and Mike Mattos, whose article, “How Do Principals Really Improve Schools?” appears in the April 2013 issue, “The Principalship.”

In this month’s issue of Educational Leadership, we question why U.S. states and districts have rushed to embrace more frequent and intensive teacher observation and evaluation by principals as a key strategy for improving schools. There’s scant evidence that past efforts in this area have resulted in improved instruction or higher levels of student achievement. Teachers themselves consistently and overwhelmingly report that the evaluation process in their schools has little or no effect on their classroom practice. Yet the pressure to devote more time and energy to supervising and evaluating educators into better performance continues to grow, and the ramifications of these evaluations for individual teachers have never been higher.

The renewed emphasis on frequent observation and evaluation is certain to improve our schools if the following conditions exist:

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